The Orientalist and the Ghost (2 page)

I’d been sent to Malaya to help in the Emergency, a Communist insurrection started by the Chinese, who wanted a Red Malaya under their control. That was out of the question, of course. The British were still there and would never let them. Not because the British wanted to preserve their rule (indeed, I had entered a colonial service in terminal decline), but to get everything nice and orderly for Independence. As Charles used to say,
Englishmen never like to leave a mess
. But defeating the Communists was not as easy as everyone thought. They hid in jungle camps, surfacing only in guerrilla warfare. Because of these terror tactics the Emergency went on for over a decade, the Communists running amok, murdering and pillaging and tearing the country apart.

Disencumbered of trunk and possessions, I hailed a taxi for Yong Peng, or The Village of Everlasting Peace. In that old rattletrap of a cab I saw the rainforest for the first time; miles and miles of it, colossal and brilliant green. Great craggy limestone cliffs and rubber plantations of tyrannous uniformity. The taxi gasped and sputtered through a valley township, a government building at its hub, with a terrace of bougainvillaea and troops in string vests, playing cricket on the
padang
. We plunged back into dense jungle for a treacherous mile or two, and as we neared The Village of Everlasting
Peace
we passed fields where Chinese farmers crouched, tending to sweet potato and tapioca crop, babies dangling in slings around their necks. The resettlement camp was seven months old when I got there and had one thousand and fifty villagers. The perimeter fence was seven feet high and looped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence I saw slattern huts, barefoot children and a sickly clump of banana trees. The village stretched for a quarter of a mile, ending at the ascent of a steep jungly hill on the far side.

The Village of Everlasting Peace was one of thousands of resettlement camps built to quarantine the Chinese squatters from the Communists. The government wanted to cut the terrorists off from the supporters who supplied them with money and food. So they rounded up the Chinese squatters in army trucks, burnt down their jungle settlements and brought them to live under government supervision in New Villages. It was a frightfully sad business. None of the squatters wanted to leave their homes and they cried and made a fuss. But the War against Communism was no ordinary war and could not be fought in an ordinary way. We had to hit them where it hurt.

The taxi halted at the village gates and the driver, a Tamil gentleman, asked me for the fare. We had attracted the attention of a Sikh guard, standing at the gate with a rifle slung over his shoulder. The guard wore a turban, a khaki jacket and shorts, and long woollen socks pulled up to his knees. He had tremendous,
unkempt
sideburns and his face was unctuous with sweat. Slamming the taxi door behind me, I went up to him and introduced myself as the new Assistant Resettlement Officer. I asked him if he’d be kind enough to show me to the office of Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich. The Sikh guard adjusted his rifle, suspicious and taciturn. Sun-dizzy and unsteady on my feet, I repeated my introduction, taking care to speak very slowly. I was interrupted, however, by a great cockerel scurrying, shrieking, down the track towards us and thrashing its feathers in terror. Two Chinese boys scampered after the bird, beating the air with sticks and making war sounds. They halted when they saw me, and I said hello in three dialects. They stared and whispered and the cockerel scuttled and squawked to freedom. The boys then shouted a few words of Malay to the Sikh guard, who laughed and showed off his fine-looking teeth as he waved them away with the butt of his rifle.

Gesturing that I should follow, the guard led me through the gates. And as we journeyed deeper into the resettlement camp my stomach began to weigh more than a stomach ought. During my training for Colonial service I’d seen slide shows of the prototype New Village. The standard was basic, but the huts clean and functional, the villagers camera-shy but good-natured. The Village of Everlasting Peace fell atrociously short of this ideal. It were as though I’d passed through a looking-glass, held up to the prototype to reflect back poverty and filth: a shantyland of cheap huts knocked
up
from plywood, corrugated iron and palm leaves – huts likely to collapse if the occupants so much as sneezed. Rubbish was heaped in stinking piles as though monuments to the spirit of squalor. Poultry strutted on the hard-trodden earth, indiscriminate about where they pecked and defecated. I heard the dying squeals of a pig as it was slaughtered. The village, I thought, was ripe for disease.

Rubber tapping had finished for the day, but most villagers had gone to work in the vegetable gardens, leaving only the elderly and children behind. The elderly shuffled about, wattles quivering, toothless and sunken-cheeked. Urchins sweeping with brooms taller than they were themselves stared at me out of solemn moonchild eyes. A lame man spat betel-nut juice. An old crone with the wicked glint of dementia crouched in a doorway, throwing scraps to her ducklings. On the door frame hung lucky charms of red and gold, blessing her hovel with sons and prosperity.

‘Are you a government spy sent to find out which of us are Communists?’ she called out in Cantonese.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I work for the government but I am not here to spy.’

‘Hah!’ said the woman, ‘that is what all the government agents say.’

The Sikh guard had moved on and to catch him up I dashed across a perilously wobbly plank bridging a ditch. On the other side of the ditch a girl was bent by a standpipe, washing potatoes dug out of the soil. The girl was pretty and wore her hair in plaits. When she
saw
me she blushed and a potato leapt from her hand, as though petrified by her strength of attraction to me.
Gosh!
I thought as the girl scrabbled about after the leaping potato.
They aren’t bad, these Chinese girls
. And I felt the unhappy throbbing in my nose subside.

The Sikh guard led me to a wooden bungalow, the only building in the village fit for human habitation. He went up on the veranda and shouted: ‘
Tuan, Tuan!
’

‘No need to shout,’ came a voice. ‘I’m right behind you.’

I turned round and saw Charles Dulwich for the first time. Good old Charles; pink and steaming with perspiration, and built like a grizzly bear. He beamed and shambled towards us as though the heat had him in shackles. He took my hand in his huge damp paw and shook it.

‘Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich. You must be my new assistant. Splendid.’

Charles had the physiognomy of a dissolute aristocrat. He had a magnificent, meandering nose (broken twice while he was a POW in Singapore) and an alcoholic’s complexion, jaundiced and spidery of capillary. When he smiled, the skin around his eyes gathered into deltas of a thousand and one tributaries. He was forty-four when I met him and at the time I thought he was terrifically old.

Charles showed me inside the bungalow, to the rudimentary office with desks and chairs, concrete floor and chicken-wire windows. We each sat down in a rattan chair, or, rather, Charles sat and I
collapsed
. Two days of
air
travel and the trauma of separation from my trunk had left me fatigued. Furthermore I was depressed by conditions in the village and had to summon the best of my acting skills to hide this. In a bright, inquisitive manner I asked about the villagers and the day-to-day running of the resettlement camp. Charles confessed he was more of an administrator than a ‘friend of the people’ and attributed this failure to language barriers.

‘That’s why you’re here, old chap,’ he said, ‘to build bridges between us Foreign Devils and the Chinese.’

Charles dabbed his brow with his handkerchief and told me frankly that my predecessor, the late Ah Wing, hadn’t been much of a bridge-builder – in fact, his cold imperious manner had infested the waters with crocodiles.

‘Is that why he was murdered?’ I asked.

Charles said it may have been a factor.

‘Well, I shall do my best to avoid the same fate!’ I joked, fatigue robbing me of taste.

Charles apologized for the mess on my desk, cluttered with the late Ah Wing’s unfinished paperwork, a green Olivetti and a portrait of a fierce little Chinese lady. The table legs stood in china cups of kerosene and water, ant death traps full of their little black carcasses. It was late in the afternoon and the villagers were returning from the vegetable gardens, jangling bicycle bells and calling to one another, voices rising and falling in colloquial scales. I heard a woman shouting: ‘Second daughter! Where are you? Tell third brother to fetch water from the well!’ I heard notes
faltering
from a bamboo flute and the bleating of a goat in its pen.

Let me stop here and confess: my memory is not what it used to be. The events of this morning are already lost in the mists of vagueness. Did I return my library books? Did I go to the town hall and register Adam and Julia for free school dinners? Other resources have to be consulted. So how can it be that the dull, plaintive, half-century-old bleats of a goat are sharper in my memory than a news bulletin heard on the radio not twenty minutes ago? The ether amasses into a finger of blame and points to all the ghosts, the spectral émigrés of my days in Malaya. I often wonder why I’ve only acquired ghosts from the bandit-ridden end of the Colonial era, and not from any other time in my life. I can’t puzzle it out. Old Smythe across the hall died of natural causes in February (God rest his soul) and I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since. Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich, on the other hand, committed suicide forty-eight years ago, but was in my kitchen only last night, smoking opium and reminiscing about the evening we sat on the veranda drinking whisky
stengahs
, as the gramophone trumpeted out ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and the villagers cooked Humphrey the Saint Bernard on a great fire.
Do you remember the smell of roast dog?
Charles said.
I drool at the memory
. I’d been terribly fond of Humphrey and didn’t care to remember. But
eau de
charred canine filled my nostrils anyway. Just as Charles, the beast, wished it to.

Not all the ghosts are as bothersome as Charles (thank God). Most of the visitations are silent, isolated fragments of the past, recurring in the here and now, before dissolving into nothingness. Sometimes the Sikh guard stands sentinel outside the hallway cupboard, rifle slung over his shoulder, his skin slick with equatorial humidity. Sometimes the pretty girl with the plaits bends in front of the fireplace, washing potatoes as the gas valves hiss. The girl, absorbed in rinsing mud off a potato, then looks up, startled, and the potato once again makes that eternal leap of lust, as though I were a handsome young man of twenty-five, and not the rheumy-eyed old devil lying in ambush in the bathroom mirror. Every day dozens of the not-so-dearly departed come to my living quarters, whatever non-corporeal substance they are made of transfiguring into ephemeral scenes of the past. Every single Godforsaken day. Pity this old man, for they will never let me forget.

The bicycle bells trilled and the bamboo flautist performed his folk-song, and Charles clapped his hands and shouted,
Boy!
and a sulky-mouthed Malay presented himself in the doorway. Charles barked an order to the youth, who disappeared, then reappeared with two glasses on a teakwood tray; all sensual hip movement and demurely lowered camel lashes. He had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen, and had obviously been destined to be a seductress of the highest order, though some unhappy quirk of fate made him a boy instead,
which
was of no good to anyone (or so I naively thought at the time). He served us our drinks and lemon-barley water spilt everywhere.

‘That vain creature is incapable of putting anything down without sloshing it,’ Charles said crossly.

He barked again to the boy, who sulked out on to the veranda. Seconds later there was a flutter above Charles’s head as a fan of fluted paper wafted the air, disturbing his pale Byronic curls. The fan was attached to the ceiling and was moved back and forth by a length of string. The string descended to the veranda, where it ended in a loop secured around the big toe of the servant boy. The servant boy sat on a chair, swinging his foot and simmering with humiliation. I thought the contraption vulgar and decadent and very clever. Under the fluted paper breeze Charles tippled on gin and lemon barley and enlightened me about my future duties as Assistant Resettlement Officer.

Evening came and consumed Malaya with a rich and sultry darkness. As Charles lit an oil lamp a powerful siren tore through the village.

‘Seven p.m. curfew,’ Charles said. ‘All the villagers are confined to their huts from now till five a.m.’

‘Does the curfew apply to us as well?’ I asked.

‘No. Though to stray beyond the fence after dark might be damaging to your life expectancy.’ Charles gave a rueful chuckle, like a host regretting the north-facing aspect of the guestroom.

We dined on the veranda, the kerosene lamp bringing in moths from far and wide. How the winged fiends
rejoiced
, pirouetting and colliding midair, their shadowy doppelgängers looming on the walls. We dined on quail-egg soup, duck in ginger and
hoi sin
sauce, jasmine rice and a dessert of lychees and rambutans, served to us by Winston Lau, the cook. Once he’d put the plates on the table Winston retreated to the shadows, hungering for leftovers and resenting what mouthfuls we ate.

Much of the village could be seen from the veranda. One could see as far as the perimeter fence, where armed guards strolled by on night patrol. Tilly lamps illuminated the outermost foliage of the jungle; threshold to the land of scorpions, flying reptiles and orang-utan (and other beasts of razor teeth and poison stings in my wildlife encyclopaedia of South East Asia). The jungle was nature at its most terrible and prolific. Beneath the tranquil surface of leaves it lay in wait, claws protracted.

Candle- and lamp-light leaked from hut doorways and the ventilation gaps under the roofs. Charles told me how the Chinese families lived in those huts in the hours of curfew; how they piddled in buckets and slept back-to-back on thin reed mats, always breathing the breath of others. The look on my face betrayed my disquiet, and Charles quickly reassured me that the squatter culture is very different from ours, and the Chinese are less desirous of privacy.